The subscribe form is where your website visitors enter their email address to sign up for your newsletter or other email marketing campaign.  You’ll just need to enter a few pieces of information to create the form. Then copy/paste the code we generate for you to your web page.

The subscribe form creator will prompt you for just a few pieces of information:

1. Your Email Address — the incoming email address for your email campaigns, the one you have or will specify in Email Marketing Pro’s POP settings
2. The web address (URL) for a “Thank You” page –  It’s always a good idea to thank the visitor in some way after they subscribe.  The subscribe will be sent here after successfully subscribing to your newsletter.
3. Optional: First Name, Last Name – these checkboxes will create inputs where the website visitor can enter their first name and last name

The subscribe form consists of a snippet of html code and javascript. You will need to add the html code and javascript to the web page that will display your subscribe form.

How does it all  work?

1. A visitor to your website enters their email address and information on your web form and clicks the submit button.
2. Next, our web server sends an email to your campaign email address, the one you entered in step 1, with the word “SUBSCRIBE” in the subject line.
3. In Email Marketing Pro, run a “Subscribe Check” to detect the subscribe requests and insert the contacts into Email Marketing Pro. The Subscribe Check automatically reads your incoming mail (using the settings your specified as your POP Settings) for the requests.

The subscribe form creation tool is here: http://www.emailmarketingprofessional.com/subscribe/create.php

Please let us know if you have any questions.

With Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, blogs, and instant messaging available, a lot of small businesses and professionals – the complacent ones — question the effectiveness of Email Marketing.

Couldn’t I just post a status update to Facebook instead of sending a marketing email?  Couldn’t I spend that time concentrating on other marketing activities? I get most of my business by word of mouth, through the yellow pages. Who needs it?

Consider the following statistics, from a 2011 study by News Broadcast Network, Inc.

• 83% of business people check email first every single day
• 72% check it 6 or more times per day

And consider this: to get an account on Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr, what’s the first thing you need? Yep, an email address. Because email is fast, convenient, and green, consumers prefer using email for business correspondence. And, unlike a Twitter account, practically everyone has one.

So, have you you looked in your inbox recently and paid attention to who uses email marketing?

Large companies such as Target, WalMart, Groupon, to name a few.  Sure, they have Facebook pages and Twitter accounts just like you. But, in addition, they use email marketing, they use it often, and they use it well.  Your competitors are also using email marketing, taking the lunch right off your table.

That’s because they understand three marketing essentials that all successful businesseses understand. And I’m not talking about the theoretical 3 P’s of marketing you may have learned in college: product, place, and price. Sure, those are relevant.

What I’m talking about the real 3 P’s:  persistence, persistence, persistence.

Different studies show different statistics, but the general rule of thumb with any business is that the customer must be exposed to your offering at least 7 or 8 times before they will make a decision to purchase.

In addition, the customer learns about your business the same way they learn facts in school.  Our educational system demonstrates that being exposed to knowledge in a variety of forms, over and over again, will reinforce that knowledge to the point that it becomes easily recalled.

So, is it enough that the customer sees your ad in the Google  sponsored links? No.

Is it enough that the customer visits your website and reads about the wonderful products and services you offer? No, but getting warmer.

The fact is, your marketing efforts need to support one another in order to make that final sale.

For example, your potential customer visited the website you worked hard on.  That’s great – money well spent on the web hosting. But what now? Cross your fingers and hope they’re in a buying mood?

An inexpensive, personalized, and proven approach is to capture the email address of your website visitor. Offer them free information, a free gift, an incentive for subscribing to your mailing list. Then, you have on your hands a gold mine.  A formula for getting the customer to your site again and again, without blowing your advertising budget.

The special offer they receive in their inbox may be that 7th or 8th exposure they’ve had to your  business — the one that makes the sale.

Of the hundreds of email marketing messages sitting in my inbox this holiday season,  one that definitely got opened was a marketing email from Neflix.  If you’re a Netflix customer, you may have seen it. The subject line reads, “Have an extra DVD rental on us this holiday.”  The subject line stood out, I think, for a number of reasons. The most obvious is that it presented a concise call to action. The strong verb “have” led me to believe, correctly, that if I were to open the email, that I would end up having something of benefit to me. And, it did its job well of creating in me the desire to act: in this case, to open the email.

 I began to wonder if the call to action was a common tactic in email subject lines, and have found in my informal way that it is, in fact, not a comonly used tactic. Most marketers try to make me open their emails by using catchy, cute, or gimmicky subject lines that fail to make me want to act upon anything. Some examples in my inbox are: “Your next vacaction starts today.”  Really, I think, I’m not even packed and certainly haven’t planned to go anywhere anytime soon, much less today. Another: “spend the day brainstorming with me.” No, thanks, that sounds like work and I don’t have time. “Be the first to know about our latest promos and freebies,” reads another. Oh, you expect me to believe that I’ll be the first person to know? Doesn’t inspire me to open the email.

Once I opened the offer from Netflix, I found a simple, short, well-designed coupon with an obvious and easy-to follow call to action. The overall result: I get a free DVD. Netflix retains a loyal customer who certainly will not unsubscribe from their mailing list, if I can get something out of it.

Important note: This information is intended as a guide only.  Your email account provider can change its email policy at any time without any prior notification.  Check your email account provider’s documentation or ask about the email send rate and bulk email policies, before proceeding with a mass email campaign.

Subscribing to our monthly plan will enable you to use Email Marketing Pro without worrying about send limits.

Google Gmail Email Send Rate Limit & Restrictions
The following restrictions apply when sending emails from a Google Gmail account:

• Gmail email send limit – no more than 500 recipients per message for the Gmail web interface, or max 100 recipients if you are using an email client software.
• Gmail other SMTP limits – outgoing messages sent via Google Gmail can not exceed 10Mb per email (including attachments)
• Google Mail Policy - http://www.google.com/mail/help/program_policies.html
• Google Mail SMTP restriction expiry method – the restriction is automatically removed within 24 hours after the limit was reached.

MSN Hotmail Email Send Rate Limit & Restrictions
The following restrictions apply when sending emails from a Hotmail account:

• Hotmail email send limit – no more than 100 recipients per day.
• Hotmail other SMTP limits – outgoing messages sent via Hotmail can not exceed 10Mb per email (including attachments)

Yahoo Mail – Email Send Rate Limits & Other Email Restrictions
The following restrictions apply when sending emails from a Yahoo Mail account:

• Yahoo Mail email send limit – no more than 100 emails or recipients per hour
• Yahoo Mail other SMTP limits – max 10Mb per message for the free Yahoo Mail Service, or 20Mb per message for Yahoo! Mail Plus
• Yahoo! Anti-Spam Policy - http://docs.yahoo.com/info/guidelines/spam.html
• Yahoo Mail SMTP restriction expiry method – N/A

Lycos Mail – Email Send Limits & Restrictions
The following restrictions apply when sending emails from a Lycos Mail account:

• Lycos Mail email send limit – max 25 recipients per message and max 250 emails per day
• Lycos Mail other SMTP limits – Lycos Mail does not have a limit to the attachment file size at this time.
• Lycos Email Policy - http://info.lycos.com/legal/mail_terms.html

AOL Email Send (Rate) Limits
AOL imposes a rate limit on an AOL member when a member exceeds the acceptable number of email messages sent in a given time period. The following restrictions apply when sending emails from an AOL connection:

• AOL email send limit – no more than 100 recipients per message or 500 recipients per connection
• AOL other SMTP limits – max 16mb per message
• AOL email-outbound policy - http://postmaster-us.info.aol.com/ipt/
• AOL SMTP restriction expiry method – N/A